Essendi: restructuring at scale

Essendi (formerly known as AccorInvest) is the owner and operator of 550 hotels, mainly in Europe. Over the last few years, the organisation has engaged in a major restructuring and refinancing exercise.

Since 2021 Essendi has consolidated its hotel portfolio, focusing on increasing the quality and value of its economy and midscale European assets. The group is selling off hotels it owns elsewhere around the world, such as in Argentina.

CEO Gilles Clavié said that a big part of Essendi’s transformation has been reducing debt from €5bn to €3bn while “turnover has been reinstalled and margin has grown.”

In 2025, Essendi announced the success of its full refinancing which includes note issuances plus sustainability-linked conditions for the new senior term loan facilities.

The company’s ESG commitments have been an integral part of the refinancing and debt reduction, Clavié said, and made absolute sense given Essendi’s position as both and owner and operator of its assets.

“We explained to our operational guys that we need to save energy and water because it will help us in terms of margin. And from our owner standpoint, we expect to increase, or at least not degrade, the value of this portfolio,” he said.

How has so much been achieved so rapidly? A deep and thorough analysis of the situation was followed by announcements of the transformation plan, said Clavié, but it was necessary to adapt the leaders of the organisation into a matrix structure.
He said: “We have all the expertise in verticals and the regions horizontally, and all those heads of departments were around me and making sure that every statement, every idea and decision was understood and shared between all of us, and then pushed so that everyone got the same information at the same time.”

RBH Hospitality Management: in-house expertise and data analytics

RBH Hospitality Management has a different business model: it owns no assets but manages 56 hotels on behalf of 27 different owners. RBH has been “ahead of the game for a number of years” when it comes to sustainable initiatives, according to CEO David Hart. However, its ability to implement ESG measures is entirely dependent on owners, whose attitudes to ESG vary considerably.

Voltage optimisation, for example, can demonstrate a very clear ROI, “but some owners just do not want to put their cash there and that’s still a problem nowadays,” Hart said.

“At the other end of the spectrum, there are owners who will ladle cash into projects even without any evidence of short-to-medium ROI because it’s what they believe is right,” he continued. “Sustainability is something we’re hugely focussed on but there’s still a massive range of opinions in the industry.”

In terms of leadership and vision, RBH’s competitive edge is rooted in two long-standing decisions, said Hart: to do everything in-house, and to invest early in data and business intelligence.

“Essentially as a management company, all we are is people,” he said. “The main decision we’ve probably made and stuck to over the years is to effectively do everything in house. We’ve never wanted to outsource.” This includes employing an IT helpdesk plus standalone personnel for capital projects, procurement, legal, and dedicated health and safety specialists.

“Having that all in-house doesn’t come cheap, obviously, but we always saw it as a value add and really beneficial to the owners,” he said.

RBH moved on from using Excel for budgeting and forecasting 20 years ago and, in 2014, implemented IBM Cognos, a business analytics system. As a third-party management company Hart reckoned: “We were really the first people to do that, and it gave us a huge advantage out there.”

BWH Hotels GB: reinvestment and growth

BWH Hotels GB is a hotel network and brand affiliation company that neither owns nor manages its hotels. As the CEO, Tim Rumney must understand the needs and concerns of his ownership community.

The owner profile has changed, with fewer multi-generational family owners and more investor groups, Rumney said, who want to see value-for-money and ROI.

BWH Hotels GB has an ambition to increase its member hotels from 230 to 330 over the next five years. Rumney explained that unlike traditional PLCs, “everything that we generate in terms of profitability stays in the system. We don’t have any shareholders to pay. So profit is reinvested back into the brand and the hotels, primarily into sales and marketing.”

He added: “If we reach our ambition for another 100 hotels, that creates the income to go back into the sales and marketing and the brand contribution.”

Quality assurance is non-negotiable, he said: “It’s important for our customers but also for our hotels that they have peers in the organisation that they can be proud of.”

The UK hotels are a mix of soft and hard brands and all of them must pass a global quality assurance inspection. “40 percent of that inspection is directly related to what the customer is telling us. Ultimately, we do have the option to terminate hotels, and we have terminated five this year.”

However, most hotels that go into probation following an inspection will raise their game and improve, he added.

Looking ahead, Rumney is implementing a design excellence programme so hotels are: “fit for purpose in terms of the design and the quality of their furnishings and fixtures.”

“Obviously in the current climate, the profitability of the average hotel is very challenged, but we work very closely with the hotels to come up with a deliverable capex plan,” he said.

All quotes taken from the ‘Rising leadership: making bold moves in a changing market’ session at the Annual Hospitality Conference 2025 in Manchester. The session was moderated by Siobhan Wilson, senior vice president and country leader, Oracle UK.

By Ben Walker